Thursday, 30 May 2013

The typical current requirements of the customers I work with, so they tell me, are to stick with Windows + VCL thanks to the long-term projects they have ongoing. Because of this I’ve not really spent too much time getting to know FireMonkey in excruciating detail since it was introduced. However, given that the quintessence of the XE4 release has been iOS support and this typically† revolves around using FireMonkey, I figured maybe it was about time to roll the sleeves up and get stuck in.

This post is a summary run-though of the things I bumped into, how I got on, what I figured out, what problems I encountered and how I achieved a few things whilst checking out the latest platform-targeting in the Delphi product line.

Ah, it’s been released… The May 2013 release of Oxygene, released on 27th May 2013, brings us Oxygene 6.0, and Oxygene 6.0 brings us the official release of Oxygene for Cocoa.

The Oxygene language now gives ways of coding for all the currently interesting platforms using the three available editions of Oxygene:

Oxygene for .NET (formerly also known as Delphi Prism) – targets the .NET platform, allowing you to build Windows applications, Windows phone applications, Silverlight applications and so on, using the relevant .NET frameworks. Also targets the Mono platform, allowing applications to go to the many places where Mono goes, such as Mac and Linux and also Android and iPhone/iPad using Xamarin.Android (aka Mono for Android) and Xamarin.iOS (aka MonoTouch) using those frameworks.

Oxygene for Cocoa – targets iOS and OS X allowing native ARM applications to be built for iPhone and iPad as well as 64-bit native OS X applications. Applications are built against the native OS X Cocoa and iOS CocoaTouch frameworks.

Oxygene is hosted in Visual Studio 2012 (support for Visual Studio 2010 has now been phased out in Oxygene 6.0). If you don;t have a copy of Visual Studio 2012 the Oxygene installer can set up the Visual Studio 2012 shell first.

For existing users of Oxygene for .NET and/or Oxygene for Java there are some new features added to Oxygene 6.0, including a spate of new conditional defines to help distinguish which compiler built your code or which platform you are targeting:

Oxygene 6.0 edition

Edition define

Platform define

GC/ARC define

.NET

ECHOES

DOTNET

GC

Java

COOPER

JAVA

GC

Cocoa

NOUGAT

COCOA

ARC

However the main thrust of the release is Oxygene for Cocoa, which works in conjunction (if you want) with Apple’s UI designer to support visual UI design via nib (.xib) files or storyboard files. It also understands and fully supports multi-part method names so that it fits in directly with the Objective-C naming system and can represent and refer to any existing methods. It support the iOS Simulator, supports debugging there and on-device and offers all the options needed to sign and provision your apps. It supports ARC (automatic reference counting), understands bridging and uses an LLVM back-end to generate good ARM and 64-bit Intel code.

It ships with all the standard frameworks imported and has a tool that allows you to import any additional libraries you need to work with. Because Oxygene always uses the frameworks that natively exist on the target platforms, there is not an awful lot to learn specific to Oxygene when building Mac or iOS apps. Anything you learn on the Internet about how to build aspects of Mac/iOS apps applies directly – it’s just a case of expressing the various local API calls in the Oxygene syntax, which is a very familiar Object Pascal based syntax.

During pre-release development Oxygene for Cocoa was called Project “Nougat” and I worked with it a lot to keep tabs on how it progressed. I’ve built a whole bundle of test apps to keep on top of (mostly) iOS application development techniques by simply following various online Objective-C tutorials, and just entering the code in Pascal instead of in Objective-C.

I’m delighted Oxygene for Cocoa is now released as I’ve been productive with the tool for quite a long time now. I’ve wanted to make blog posts about how I do thing with it, but given it’s just a syntax shift there hasn’t really been much of a need for it. I guess maybe I’ll do one at some point to show the basics of building up an iOS app in the Visual Studio IDE and getting it launching in iOS Simulator, but after that it’s just writing code in the same way any other iOS developer does; just in Pascal.

AutoRuns – a tool that shows all the things that have set themselves up to auto-start with your system

Use of these tools has helped solve many a problem. But I’ve just bumped into another splendid process analysis tool called Process Hacker. This one is open source and accessible from SourceForge. It can drill down and show additional information that Process Explorer misses, such as showing programs with active network connections, management of services and real time disk access.

This looks great; a very useful addition to the problem-solving arsenal!